Q6600 WC & OC

PMol

PMol

PMol

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Horsham, West Sussex
I'm new here so please bare with me. I want to overclock and watercool my current PC. Here is what I have now:

Q6600 (already OC'd to 3ghz)
Titan Fenrir CPU cooler
Asus P5K
4gb Corsair Twin DDR2 (1066mhz)
ATI HD 4870
Velociraptor 300gb HDD
Samsung 500gb HDD
PSU 800w (I'm not 100% sure on this)
Antec 900 2 case

My CPU runs about 27 deg.C on idle, and approx. 40 deg.C under load, which already seems quite cool. This is why I want to overclock to 3.5-4.0ghz if possible.

Here are my questions....

1) Does my Antec case have the space and fittings to install a decent custom loop water cooling system?

2) CPU-Z shows that my RAM is running at 534mhz, shouldn't this read 1066mhz? or am I confused on this one?

3) My GPU reads idle temperatures of 80 deg.C, so its important to me that I water cool the graphics card. Also the motherboard chipset and CPU. Can anyone help me find/choose all the parts I would need to do this? Koolance seem like a good choice.

That's about it. Once the water is installed I will read through the guides here on the forums and figure out the OC settings myself.

Thanks in advance.
 
1) Does my Antec case have the space and fittings to install a decent custom loop water cooling system?

Yeah no problems.. not sure on Rad sizes tho.

2) CPU-Z shows that my RAM is running at 534mhz, shouldn't this read 1066mhz? or am I confused on this one?

534Mhz DDR is 1066Mhz

3) My GPU reads idle temperatures of 80 deg.C, so its important to me that I water cool the graphics card. Also the motherboard chipset and CPU. Can anyone help me find/choose all the parts I would need to do this? Koolance seem like a good choice.

Thats quite high idle temp.. Be carefull on replacing the cooler on the 4870. There are some VRM's by the power supply that MUST be cooled. If not they tend to blow up. I know this from experience.. :eek:
 
OK I just checked in the BIOS and the DRAM frequency is set to DDR2-1066. Thanks.
 
OK I did some reading, and played around in the BIOS, and I seem to have my CPU running stable (so far) at 3.2ghz. I would still like to go watercooled and push it further.

Untitled.jpg
 
Those temperatures look fine, so you could probably push it further on your air cooler to see what sort of overclock you could get. I doubt you would get much more than an extra 100-200Mhz with watercooling than with a decent air cooler.

As much fun as it is tinkering with a water cooling setup I can't help but think if you want to see a real performance increase then putting the money you would spend on a decent water cooling loop towards a 2500k i5, mobo and ram would make more sense, especially if you can get a bit from selling your existing kit.

In fact just re-reading your post you want to water cool the cpu, gfx and chipset, for the cost of a loop to do that you could get a decent i5/i7 setup + an SSD for even more of a speed increase.
 
Does not appear to be stable. When leaving the computer on (idle) for long periods of time (overnight, then for a couple of hours this morning) I came back to find it had frozen up.
Any suggestions please?
 
Inside 902 you may be able to fit a 240 rad at the front after removing the drive bays, and another 120 rad at the rear fan area but have to check with the dimensions with that one.

How about just getting an after market cooler for the 4870, like a Vortex Neo which is cheap but effective, and saving the rest for a sandy setup?

edit:
Cooling the Mobo chipset will mostly increase the temps in the water loop if you are going to water cool. Most of the time reapplying a good TIM for the north bridge and south bridge chips and properly fastening like bolt moding the sinks to the mobo will reduce temps easily.
What motherboard do you have?
 
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Avathar77 said:
Inside 902 you may be able to fit a 240 rad at the front after removing the drive bays, and another 120 rad at the rear fan area but have to check with the dimensions with that one.

How about just getting an after market cooler for the 4870, like a Vortex Neo which is cheap but effective, and saving the rest for a sandy setup?

edit:
Cooling the Mobo chipset will mostly increase the temps in the water loop if you are going to water cool. Most of the time reapplying a good TIM for the north bridge and south bridge chips and properly fastening like bolt moding the sinks to the mobo will reduce temps easily.
What motherboard do you have?
Click to expand...

It's not stable at 3.2ghz. I have an Asus P5K, but I need to go and do some more reading/learning before I try again. Thanks for the advice.
 
Seems strange to want to watercool old kit when it would have been more beneficial when it was new.

Might be better to go new build and use third party cooling.

Q6600 is slow compared with latest tech and overclockinh by 5% won't make that much difference.
 
I had a Q6600 under water at 3.6GHz, it was pretty unstable so I went back to air at 3.2GHz and noticed no issues apart from stability.

I now run an i7-2600k at 4.5GHz with ease and it's completely stable.
 
I can't remember which ones, but the cheaper of the ASUS P5Ks didn't have good enough voltage regulation to do more than 3.2ghz on quads. I upgraded to one of the higher spec ones and that solved the problem.
 
I have my Q6600 at 3.2GHz on a £12 Freezer 7 cooler, so I'm sure you can do just as good and better on that cooler :)

ae5fa52f.png


Edit: Just seen you have a B3 revision which doesn't clock as well as a G0 :(
 
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It's not worth throwing money at this rig I wouldn't say the Q6600 is slow though lol.As long as you aren't bottlenecking your graphics card (which it's not) it's fine.
Use Intel burn test to test for overclock stability unfortunately you have a B3 revision which run hotter and in general don't clock as well as G0 revisions.
As long as gaming load is 60c or less it's fine If I were looking to upgrade I'd sell the 8800gt and get a 5850 second hand.
 
andy_mk3 said:
I have my Q6600 at 3.2GHz on a £12 Freezer 7 cooler, so I'm sure you can do just as good and better on that cooler :)



Edit: Just seen you have a B3 revision which doesn't clock as well as a G0 :(
Click to expand...

set stress level to custom and select free memory not available but free memory in task manager then set threads to 4
 
I had a B3, max you can get out of them is 3.4, anything more than that is impossible unless your going to overclock in the middle of winter outside in a snowstorm under liquid nitrogen
 
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